The semiotics–the poetry–of the phrase “9/11” increasingly strikes me. For one, it removes the year from the date, which puts it in a continual, circular temporarily (there is always a recent and an upcoming September) rather than a linear annual one (by now 2001 seems so far away to my students!). The effect is that we are in constant state of 9/11-ness and always will be, rather than being able to see it as a moment, in the past, that we can move beyond. This is my understanding, and probably one of the most useful ways into, what many people mean by the state of exception.

This image is taken from the exhibition State of Exception, a collaboration between artist Richard Barnes and anthropologist Jason De Leon. Through objects found in the desert, the project explores the experience of crossing the U.S./mexico border illegally.

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So, as some of you might have noticed, I’ve recently decided to pick an English Premier League team. I’ve resisted this for years, because I wanted to maintain my Ligue 1 chauvinism, as that’s where my football roots lie (way back when Didier Drogba was on Marseille & Lyon won every year), but my local cable package still doesn’t include their games. So PL it is. Later, I might have some more general thought on this process, which seems to be becoming a way for a certain type of American to enter a kind of cosmopolitan ecumene. For now, however, I’ll just be giving my current power rankings, based on my first week of really watching closely.

There is a great summary of Jacques Ranciere’s notion of a “politics of police” over at Critical Theory.com

We can see how these police partitions work in the events of Occupy Wall Street.

You see, some bankers made this park on stolen native land for them to eat lunch in while they rested from robbing the world of millions of dollars with complicated derivatives and other bullshit nobody understands. When some hipsters decided they wanted to camp out on Wall Street, the police were like “GTFO bro”. And when those hipsters started camping out in Zuccoti Park and ruining those bankers lunches, the police calmly reminded the protesters that the park belonged to white people in suits. The police reminded the protesters that if they want to take part in this “politics” business they need to vote like everyone else, or at least have some sort of “concrete demands”. But they didn’t, so then they started pepper spraying kids.

Lol democracy.

That’s what the police order does, it tells you to take part in the fake politics – casting a ballot, going to a town hall – and tries to divest energy from what Ranciere calls real politics. After all, the Egyptian revolution didn’t start because people started sending nicely worded petitions to the government. It started when people manifested themselves in the public spaces that were once apolitical.

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I’m a big fan of Cliff Rosenberg’s work on police as a mechanism of power operating through and in the name of the social. His work on immigration at the beginning of the 20th century in France is one of the bases for my own concept of a “post-social police,” by way of contrast with the police reforms i witnessed in the early 21st. So I was pleased to see that he made an explicit connection between regimes of the social in a recent review of Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain:

Did population policy under Stalin differ, in any fundamental respect, from those of inter-war France or other Western countries? In a radical rethinking of the Soviet experience, Stephen Kotkin said no. Magnetic Mountain moved the field of Soviet history past an increasingly sterile cold war standoff between the so-called new social history and the totalitarian school. With the social history generation, Kotkin insisted on seeing the Soviet project from the perspective of ordinary people, subject to the same kind of forces that applied throughout Europe. He had no truck with ideas like oriental despotism or Russian exceptionalism, but, with the totalitarian school, he took ideology seriously, presenting everyday life and high politics within a single analytical frame. To do so, he drew eclectically on a range of theoretical perspectives, above all on the work of the late Michel Foucault. Foucault often implied that Auschwitz and the Gulag were the logical outcome of the Enlightenment project, but his primary goal was to illuminate the corrosive, coercive nature of liberal reform efforts in Western Europe, to puncture their claims to universality. The vast bulk of his corpus avoided the twentieth century. Kotkin, by contrast, used Foucault’s perspective directly on the Soviet system itself.

Population Politics, Power and the Problem of Modernity in Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain

In order to spurn me on when I need writing inspiration, and as its own form of procrastination, I created a Spotify playlist of all the songs I remember listening to while while in France during my dissertation research. Now I’ve learned that you can embed Spotify playlists into WordPress posts, so you’re all in luck and can play along at home:

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In one of Aesop’s fables a fox comes to the den of a sick lion. the lion calls out for him to enter, but the cunning fox remains outside. ‘Why won’t you come in?’ the lion asks. And the fox answers: ‘I’d come straight away if I didn’t see a lot of tracks going in but none coming out.’. In Horace’s version: ‘Vestigia terrent‘, ‘The footprints are scary’; it has become a familiar quotation. Weber gave the impression of a sick lion to those who saw him during his illness–though certainly a lion without danger. This ‘vestigia terrent‘ kept going through my head as I ventured deeper into the field of Weber studies. Was it wise of me? Doubts rose up again and again. here too there were many tracks going in but few coming out. I had been used to conducting research on open ground, on the outer edges of the social sciences fraternity. But now Weber had landed me right at the centre, where space is tight and you can feel the elbows pushing.

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One thing I’m a bit embarrassed by is how paltry our coverage of the events in Ukraine have been over the past few weeks. I’m sure I’m not alone in watching from afar and being fascinated with what is happening, but I have no special expertise in the region. Does anyone from our readership?

One thing that’s fascinated me in particular is how quickly the state of policing shifted, and what this potentially means for how we think about such things as “police,” “state,” “violence,” and “democracy.” You know, all those classic elements of Police Studies that draw on Weber.

Let us (if we can) imagine a society without language. Here is a man copulating with a woman, a tergo, and using in the act a bit of wheat paste. On this level, no perversion. Only by the progressive addition of some nouns does the crime gradually develop, grow in volume, in consistency, and attain the highest degree of transgression. the man is called the father of the woman he is possessing, who is described as being married; the amorous act is ignominiously termed sodomy; and the bit of bread bizarrely associated in this act becomes, under the noun host, a religious symbol whose flouting is sacrilege. Sade excells in collecting this pile of language: for him, the sentence has this function of founding crime: the syntax, refined by centuries of culture, becomes an elegant (in the sense we use the word…

Please write to your Senators and House Representatives to thank them for enacting a fiscal year (FY) 2014 appropriations bill that provides increased funding to federal science agencies important to social and behavioral science researchers. In addition to protecting research budgets, the FY 2014 omnibus bill was free of troublesome policy riders that would have been harmful to the social science research enterprise. Through the Consortium of Social Science Association’s (COSSA) portal, you can find out how your representative voted and send a personalized thank you note. Please take a moment to thank your elected officials for their efforts to come to final agreement on FY 2014 spending and preserve social science.

Marilyn Strathern has an article in the latest issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and, per usual, it hurts my head and will take some time to unpack, traversing the work of Paul rabinow, Marshall Sahlins, Donna Haraway, Isaac Newton, Isabelle Stengers and others in just a few short pages. When it comes to Strathern, usually this effort is far exceeded in its rewards. For now, one passage caught my eye, on the work of “relation” in Paul Rabinow’s writing:

French Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1. (1 February 2014), pp. 38-53, doi:10.1177/0957155813510670Proprietor and director of the Paris Herald newspaper, James Gordon Bennett Jnr (1841−1918) was a key agent in the development of international sporting competitions during the belle époque, promoted and mediatised by the Herald. This international newspaper, m […]

European Journal of Criminology, Vol. 11, No. 2. (1 March 2014), pp. 228-250, doi:10.1177/1477370813494860This paper examines two attempted 18th century cases of regicide: those of Robert François Damiens against Louis XV and Margaret Nicholson against George III, which have similar circumstances yet, on the face of it, strikingly different outcomes. For bot […]

European Journal of Criminology, Vol. 11, No. 2. (1 March 2014), pp. 142-168, doi:10.1177/1477370813494740The article explores two prospective fields within the burgeoning history of crime: the various responses of early modern legal systems in Europe to violent political crimes such as assassination and regicide and their representation in popular print med […]

British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 52, No. 3. (1 May 2012), pp. 463-489, doi:10.1093/bjc/azr089The last few years have seen a remarkable visual turn in criminology and this article explores some of the implications of this renewed interest in the power of images. It begins by setting out influential sociological understandings of aesthetics, before turning […]

When we started this blog over 8 years (!) ago, part of the motivation was that those of us working on issues of policing from within the discipline of anthropology felt relatively disjointed and in need of a common forum to figure out just where we could go with our research as a collective project. […]

Welcome to the last post of the 2016-2017 year of Anthropoliteia’s #BlackLivesMatter syllabus. We’ve invited all of the series contributors to offer their thoughts here as we reflect on the past year. We can’t thank all of the contributors enough— collectively, hours and hours of inspired labor and creativity went into the blog posts. The 32 […]

The editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to continue an ongoing series The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressing the confluence of race, policing and justice. You can see a growing bibliography of resources via our Mendeley feed. In this post, Kevin G. Karpiak discusses […]